Toronto Film Festival: George Clooney’s “Up In the Air” Spotlights Economic Trouble

The global economic recession isn’t just hitting the film industry; it’s seeping into the themes of the films themselves. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a number of the movies at the festival concern the impact of the economic collapse. While Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which premieres on Sunday night, might be the most obvious example, one of the most talked about dramas at the festival, Jason Reitman “Up in the Air,” explicitly explores the trauma of downsizing.

Loosely based on Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name, the film follows the travails of frequent flyer Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), an inspirational speaker and career counselor, who is called into troubled companies around the U.S. to fire employees so the bosses don’t have to.

Reitman, director of independent film hits “Thank You For Smoking” and “Juno,” told a packed press conference on Saturday that he started writing the movie during the economic boom as a satire. “But in the six years it took me to write the movie, the world changed,” he said. “I realized that the satirical scenes about getting fired weren’t funny anymore.” Because Reitman felt he couldn’t write the scenes seriously, he found real people to tell their stories in the fictional film.

Shooting in the economically hard-hit areas of St. Louis and Detroit, the production put an ad out in the local papers announcing they needed participants for a documentary about job loss. “We got a heartbreaking amount of response,” said Reitman, who interviewed 100 people, 20 of whom are in the Paramount Pictures movie.

Regarding the film’s serious economic themes, the ever-jesting Clooney joked that he had been personally affected by the recession. “I fired six of my drivers,” he said. “At some point, eight or nine is fine. And I put one of my planes on eBay.”

Joking aside, Clooney admitted that the sluggish economy had affected actors in his position trying to make smaller niche films, saying he now takes no money upfront and waits only for back-end compensation. “If they make money, you make money,” he said, “And if they don’t, you made the movie you wanted to make.”

Economic troubles are also center stage in screenwriter-turned-directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien’s “Solitary Man,” a portrait of an aging, failed car dealer magnate, played vigorously by Michael Douglas, desperately trying to mount a career comeback. While Douglas’ wheeling-dealing ladies man is nothing like the crushed mid-level employees we see axed in “Up in the Air,” his arrogance and denial offers a picture of the unethical business and moral practices that helped fuel the economic crisis—and their eventual impact on those in power.

As Steven Soderbergh, a producer on the film, told WSJ.com, “It’s a very personal take on how one engineers one’s own collapse, because of a lack of consideration and a lack of empathy and what happens when you don’t think beyond your own immediate pleasure.”

If “Solitary Man” was another movie about our fiscal troubles, ironically, it’s been one of the few films to screen early at the festival that might energize the film market here, which has been lackluster so far. Executives from Universal, Overture and Sony Pictures Classics, among others, all attended the world premiere, looking to check out the film as a possible acquisition title.